Computer architecture includes well-known components, such as a motherboard. Generally, the motherboard is a main printed circuit board (PCB) that holds system components, such as a processor, memory, etc. The motherboard also includes card slots for system expansion. The card slots can receive expansion cards that plug into the slots and communicate with the motherboard. Many motherboards include a bus for communicating between system components. Typical buses in computer architecture are distributed to multiple system components. More recent computer architectures have dedicated “lanes”, which is a point-to-point communication, such as a PCIe lane, wherein an expansion card can communicate with a dedicated processor, for example.
Especially in systems with point-to-point communication schemes, communication between expansion cards within the slots is more limited, and typically cabling needs to be added to efficiently allow cards to cross-communicate. Cabling between cards increases costs and can cause connectivity problems due to human connection errors.